


Most nights

by Zofiecfield



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Domestic, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, happy new year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28458471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiecfield/pseuds/Zofiecfield
Summary: One night to change the course of two lives.Dani slips from bed and walks for hours at night to shake the iron grip of the suburbs, of Eddie, of the world and its expectations.  Each night is the same, just Dani and the darkness.  But tonight is different.  Tonight, she finds a woman bleeding on her front steps.  Tonight, she meets Jamie.
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie, Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 62
Kudos: 178





	1. the stars are watching

Most nights, when Dani slips out of the house past midnight to roam the neighborhood, she is entirely alone. 

The world and all its inhabitants cease to exist at that hour, Dani included. 

The frame of herself, built to please, built to fit, dissolves without the world for reference.

She walks and walks in the darkness, knowing each crack in the sidewalk and each turn of the road.

She walks and with each step she disappears a bit more. 

The weight sheds away and she becomes nothing. Blissfully, nothing. Far closer to herself than she ever is in daylight.

Most nights.

All nights, really, except for this night. This one night that, arguably, could change it all.

Dani stares up at the ceiling. 

There is a crack there, faint enough to elude Eddie’s narrow eye, winding its way from the light fixture. 

It is her favorite part of this house.

The clock blinks back at her from the nightstand, a rhythmic taunt in her peripheral vision.

12:00, 12:01, 12:02

Eddie stirs next to her, his heavy arm, his clammy palm, retreating from her waist. _Finally._

12:03, 12:04

Dani pulls the covers back, shifting towards the edge of the bed. She moves slowly, to test the silence, to see if it will be sturdy enough to bear her safely.

12:05

Eddie grumbles in his sleep, fingers searching along the bedsheets. 

Dani closes her eyes, a silent plea to the night. 

12:06, 12:07

The night hears and takes mercy, reaching down to roll Eddie over with a featherlight touch. He sighs and curls up, his back to her now.

12:08, 12:09

Dani slips from bed. She picks up the clothes folded neatly on the chair in the corner. They had been lying there, waiting for the new day, which has arrived, technically.

12:10

She bids the clock goodbye and swings the bedroom door shut, holding her breath as it clicks into place.

In the bathroom, she flushes her face with water, scrubs her teeth to rid them of the hours spent on false steady breaths into the darkness.

Clothes on, and she goes.

No watch. The clock can’t hold her. The night is now her own.

The sun will catch her, eventually, will drag her back into this house as it does every dawn. 

No whimper will escape her lips. She’ll go limp and let it take her, as she always does.

But the sun is hours behind her still, playing catch-up. Its footsteps pound along, too close for her comfort, but the night wraps itself around her and muffles their thud. 

She leaves the house, locking the door behind her. Picks her way down the front steps as her breath begins to ease.

She does not look back. 

The house will be here when she returns, she knows. 

All its picturesque suburban niceties, clean angles and clean lines. 

The fiancé upstairs, asleep in the deep assurance that he has built the perfect life and cannot be shaken from it. 

The calendar full of appointments to be kept, the list of groceries on the fridge. 

The wedding announcement, framed on the mantle. The white dress, waiting in the closet, the lurking beast.

It will all be here when she comes back. 

No matter how much she wishes it would not be. 

Grotesque, the tidiness of this life. Sickening, how she dislocates her joints to fit inside it.

She shivers at the thought and begins to walk.

She walks and walks, with only the stars to watch the clock.

It’s well past 2:00 by their count when Dani returns home, having walked until her limbs grew heavy and her head finally stilled.

A night like any other night. A walk, like every other.

Until now.

The stars giggle and squirm and the moon tells them to hush. 

The story is about to begin. All this, the house, the husband, the crack in the ceiling. Purely prologue.

On this night, Dani returns home and finds, for once, she is not alone.

There is a woman sitting on her front steps.

The woman, her head bent low to rest heavy in hands, does not stir as Dani approaches. 

“Excuse me?” 

Dani kicks herself for the question mark, for the deference even in the darkness. This is, after all, her home, and this woman, after all, an intruder. 

But the slope of the woman’s shoulders leaves Dani with the unshakable feel that she is interrupting. She, the intruder instead.

The woman looks up quickly at the words.

“Shit,” the woman hisses, raking an unsteady hand through unruly curls. “Sorry.”

The woman rises slowly, hands climbing her thighs to shove her body to vertical with a groan. “Needed a moment. Figured everyone would be in for the night.”

Dani feels, oddly, as though she’s just looked up and seen a second moon. As though the world has shifted when she wasn’t looking, sending her tumbling down a different path, running parallel, just below the surface of the one she’s always known.

The dim light of the neighbor’s porch lamp catches the woman’s face, illuminating it enough. 

The face is covered in blood, bright red trickling down over browning. 

Beautiful, the face, painted like this. Beautiful in the most disarming of ways.

Dani sucks in a breath, half for the blood, half for the beauty.

The woman shrugs off the response, missing the latter. “Looks worse than it is. Nothing a bit of water and a cup of tea won’t fix.”

She does not meet Dani’s eyes.

“I’ll be off now,” the woman says, dusting her hands against her pants, leaving streaks of dirt and carnage in their wake. “Sorry, again, for bleeding on your front steps in the middle of the night.”

Dani had walked until she was empty. The cavern of her, vacant for a moment in the absence of the world’s weight, its crushing expectations and doubt. 

In that vacancy, she finds the words that would not have otherwise fit inside of her. 

“I have tea.”

The woman glances up at her, one eyebrow shooting high. “What?”

“I have tea. We’ll have to be quiet, but you should come in. For a moment. For tea.”

The woman’s brow furrows. She shifts on her feet, uncertain. 

Dani takes a little thrill at being found unexpected like this, at the surprise registering on the woman’s face. 

The woman tilts her head. “You’re inviting a total stranger, covered in blood, into your home, in the middle of the night?”

A little smile blooms on the woman’s face, within the bounds allowed by her injuries. “You’re a bit of a weirdo, you know?”

Dani smiles back at her. Easy, that smile, dug up from the depths of her.

At the back of her mind, tucked away, she registers her own surprise, her delight in this moment that does not fit. It tingles down her spine and its warmth creeps along her ribs.

Shoulders back, she walks past the woman and up the stairs to unlock the front door. 

The woman remains at the base of the stairs, watching. Her head is tilted ever so slightly, her face painted in bemused curiosity, the smile still glimmering there on the corner of her lips.

Dani pauses with her hand on the knob. 

The woman feels familiar. Not the face of her, nor the voice. But the smile, the glint in her eyes, the loose lean of her body. It's tipping Dani off-kilter, and pleasantly so. 

She feels as though the roots of her have come unstuck and have begun to dance.

If the night is willing to play, is willing to shift and slip and spin and bend, then so is Dani.

“I’m Dani,” she whispers into the night, the words bolder than they look on paper.

“Jamie,” the woman offers in return. 

“See? Now we’re not strangers,” Dani says, though some part of her objects to the term. Nothing about this woman feels like _strangers_. “Come in.”

She turns the knob and lets the door drift open.


	2. this night

Jamie scrubs her battered face in the sink while Dani hovers by, a stack of kitchen towels in hand. 

Blood swirls down the drain in lazy patterns, diluted pink, spat out, dripping off Jamie’s lips and chin every time she comes up for air.

When the water runs passably clear, Jamie shuts off the faucet, chuckling as Dani offers her a towel.

“No chance I’m mucking that up,” Jamie says, eyeing the crisp white linen as she drags her shirt up to mop off her face, despite Dani’s indignant protest.

The mask of blood and grit are gone, leaving behind a split lip to match her knuckles, and a stunning black eye, blooming in bright purples across the bridge of her nose. 

A gash across one cheek weeps slightly, pink around its edges from the hearty scrubbing. Jamie blots it with the hem of her shirt.

(The soft plane of Jamie’s stomach is _not_ , Dani notes firmly to herself, relevant to the current situation.)

Dani tugs her eyes from bare skin, up to the cut, now bleeding actively again.

She has, for a dizzying moment, the urge to reach up and brush her thumb across it. To trace from cheek to lip with the pad of a finger, to lean in and soothe it with her tongue. 

She shivers at the thought and places a palm heavy on the countertop to counteract the pull of it.

The stars giggle and earn a fond swat for their meddling.

“Is it bad?” Jamie asks. She lifts one hand to gently prod along the cut, flinching as she hits a particularly tender spot. “You’re staring.”

Dani shakes her head, a bit too far gone to produce words.

Jamie smiles at her, eyebrows knitting together. 

“Sit,” Dani manages, pointing vaguely towards the table. “I’ll make tea and find the first aid kit.”

The first aid kit is, unfortunately, in the hallway cabinet upstairs, and luck can only be pushed so far. 

Instead, Dani digs around and finds a few old band-aids in a drawer, a clean rag, and a bottle of antiseptic under the sink, from the last time she slit a finger in a fight with a carrot.

She finds the kettle too, an engagement present from one of Eddie’s aunts, tucked away behind the glass bowls and the soup pot. 

She digs a box of tea bags from the back of the pantry, something herbal she had bought on a whim and regretted quickly, and then sets the kettle to boil.

Rag dipped in alcohol, alcohol to broken skin.

Jamie’s wince followed by her own.

“So, what happened?” Dani asks, because if she says nothing, her fingers will talk for her. 

And that is far, far too much to comprehend at this hour.

The sanitized version of the night’s events sits on Jamie’s lips. 

_Bar fight, nothing new. A fist, a broken bottle. Running, nothing new._

_Broken: A haiku._

_A damn poet, a self-deprecating laugh to deflect further question._

But she looks up before she begins to speak. Looks up and finds Dani watching her, level, intent. 

Listening, truly, even when there is nothing yet to listen to. 

And, so, unexpected, the story spills from her, in long form.

_What had happened was this:_

A bar, like any other. Too many people, too much noise.

A man, his hands on a woman,

whose lips had said yes,

but whose body had not.

Consent, not obtained. 

Consent, perhaps, not even possible in a place like that.

Jamie, tired to the bone. 

Worn thin, too thin for this bar, for this night. 

Too thin for anything much these days. 

Exhausted.

Sick of men with their sharpened fangs.

Tired of women, baring their necks

because the world has striped them of all other recourse.

Done with the world itself.

The man, his hands on a woman.

Jamie, her hands on the man.

Head empty as her fingers wound into his hair.

Her knee, his nose.

His fist, her face.

He could have been Denny,

or any one of the men who breathed down her neck,

too young,

not that there is ever an age old enough to be prey.

He could have been the women who spat at her feet

and cussed, who threw her to the wolves

to save themselves.

A lamb.

A bottle, smashed against the bar. 

Glass, once cut, demands blood.

Her foot, his groin.

His bottle, her cheek.

Sirens.

She ran,

block after block

until she had lost them,

and lost herself as well.

Bits of her shedding with each pound of foot on pavement,

the anger first,

then the last dregs of hope.

A set of concrete steps,

a moment of rest,

a moment to grieve the life slipping from her

with every night like this.

And then,

“Excuse me?”

And then,

Dani.

Jamie tells the story with her eyes fixed on the wall ahead. 

She tells it as she winces, as the alcohol seeps from cotton into split flesh.

Dani winces every time she winces, as though there is no wall between them. The pain, shared.

When she finishes her story, when she takes a risk and meets Dani’s eyes, there is nothing in the space between them. 

There is no pity to cloud the air, no shake of the head, no alarm or shock or surprise.

Just pain, shared.

The story, familiar in those eyes, already written into those bones.

It takes her breath away, the understanding she finds.

The space between them, a vacuum.

It is a story told a thousand ways, a thousand cuts to bleed and clot and bleed again. 

A story told by too many voices, too many times. 

The world and its wolves, the teeth and flesh.

The lambs, smothered and torn.

A story the moon knows too well.

The kettle begins to scream and the moment shatters, shards of it embedding themselves under the skin, shrapnel to be carried forward. 

Dani dives for the stove, yanking the kettle from the burner and flipping open the spout to silence its wail, her breath held tight in her chest.

She freezes, quiet descending once again.

“I should go,” Jamie says, soft into the silence. “I don’t want to cause trouble for you.”

“No!” A little too quick. A little too much of a jump. Dani braces both hands on the edge of the stove.

Try again, slower now. 

“No. Stay. Just for one cup of tea.”

She smiles over her shoulder, but it is too thin, and Jamie sees clear through it.

A familiar story, after all.

Dani’s hands tremor as she pulls open the cabinet door, as she takes two mugs, one, then the other. They rattle against the counter as she sets them down.

The kettle is too heavy for her hands in this state, and not nearly heavy enough to steady them. It sloshes menacingly, steam slipping from the spout to bite at her.

“Let me.” 

Jamie is beside her now, hands laid on top of Dani’s to still them. 

A beat with no breath.

Dani relinquishes the kettle. Steps back, farther than she wants to, her heart having lost its rhythm entirely.

Jamie picks up the box of tea bags and examines it, skeptical. 

“ _Jesus,_ ” she mutters, sniffing inside with a dramatic grimace, one eyebrow dancing amidst curls. 

Mostly to make Dani smile, and a bit because raspberry-orange herbal tea is an insult to Tea’s good name.

Dani watches Jamie work.

A bag in each mug. Water to the brim.

Kettle set gently back on the stove.

A mug, properly steaming, pressed into her hands.

Odd, how this moment could stretch on forever. Odd, this easy domesticity with a total stranger. 

_Far easier than with…_

“Penny for your thoughts?” 

Dani’s eyes focus with sickening speed, tugged hard.

Jamie, leaning sprawled against the counter, curious and waiting.

Dani shakes her head, attempting to clear it of the dangerous train barreling through.

“Fair enough. No pennies, then.” Jamie raises the mug to Dani and then to her lips. 

She smiles a little around the rim of it, waiting for Dani to meet her eyes, waiting for the smile to catch across Dani’s face, which had grown too pale, too quickly. 

“This is disgusting, by the way. An absolute crime, Dani, to drink this. Tyranny to call it _tea_. Should be tossed in the harbor.”

Dani grants her the smile, relieved for a reason to do so.

They drink in silence, leaning back against the counter, each too restless, too on edge to settle in a chair. 

Dani finds herself sipping slowly, to make the mug last. Savoring the tea, awful as it may be, to nurse the time allotted.

She needn’t worry though, not yet. 

Jamie pours them both a second cup when the first is done. Dani finds a box of cookies while she does so. The cookies are entirely unsuited to dunking in tea, but they dunk anyway. 

Anything to stretch the time, anything to delay the morning.

The hours, unforgiving, tick by. The moon does what She can, but still, the clock advances.

Jamie stares down into her cup, swirling the last dregs of tea and crumbs slowly, pensive. 

Into the silence, which has ebbed and flowed from easy to tight to easy again, she whispers.

“Do you ever get tired of letting the world push you around? Do you ever just want to shove back? But you’re too damn tired, your knuckles too _damn_ split already to land the blow?”

Dani’s throat is thick, all of a sudden. Her breath, abandoning her without notice.

“Jesus, I’m so tired,” Jamie says.

Dani swallows hard. Brow, knit tightly. Lips, a thin line to be tiptoed across.

Jamie smiles at her, sad and heavy. “Sorry. This has been nice. I don’t get many moments like this. Quiet, peaceful. Thanks, for inviting me in for an awful cup of tea.”

Dani nods, her gut clenching violently, her lungs beginning to spasm in her chest.

“Well,” Jamie says, a hand through curls, body not ready for the next fight. “I should go, and you should get some sleep.” 

_get some sleep._

The idea of it. To go back upstairs. To lie beside Eddie. To slip back into the skin she wears to walk through the life that has been constructed around her. The life she hasn’t fought, the life she hadn’t realized could be fought.

Dani almost laughs at the absurdity of it.

_get some sleep._

The words bubble up, desperate, clawing their way from her.

“I know how it feels.”

Jamie’s eyes snap to hers and she plunges on. The water is deep and she is tired of drowning.

Exhausted.

“I know how it feels,” Dani says, “to be torn apart and reassembled in a mold someone else made. To be shoved into the corners, to be tamped down by the world’s weight. To wonder if there’s enough of you left. I mean, enough of you left to ever be _you_ again, enough of you left to even remember what you could have been if you had – if the world hadn’t –”

Jamie closes her eyes, the pain written across her in sprawling script. 

Dani watches Jamie’s breath, rising and falling. It catches, unsteady in its path, and Dani’s lungs stumble beside it.

“Jamie,” Dani whispers.

Jamie meets her eyes then, holds them. 

Her face, the picture of heartbreak, a perfect mirror of Dani’s own.

The clock continues to tick.

“Almost morning,” Jamie says after a long moment. 

It is a shame, to break a moment like this. A shame to watch it shatter. So she says the words softly, pours all that she has into them in an effort to hold the moment together for just a bit longer.

She pushes from the counter, her body moving too slowly, the jagged tightness of bruises forming under the skin.

Her mug, set gently on the edge of the sink.

Her hands, resting heavy on the cool metal. 

One more moment here, one more to guard against the coming day. 

Footsteps, light across the tile. A second mug, set beside her own.

Arms around her waist, hands aligning over hers where they rest.

Dani presses her forehead to the back of Jamie’s neck, then tips her chin to press her lips to the same spot. 

Someone shudders, the line between them too blurred to tell who.

Slowly, Jamie turns in Dani’s arms. 

The moment, walls thin and transparent now, permits.

Jamie reaches up, cradles the curve of Dani’s jaw, smooths a thumb across her bottom lip.

Dani’s eyes dip to lips, back to eyes, glancing across the cut on her cheek. Back to eyes. Hold them until the moment breaks, until it grows too thin to hold them safely.

“Almost morning,” Jamie says again, and Dani nods. 

Twin hearts breaking, soft in the night.

The stars are growing restless now, dear reader. They nudge the moon, throwing uncomfortable glances over their shoulders at the approaching sun.

This is not what they had expected. They had wanted a happy ending, much like you and I had wanted.

The moon quiets them, bundles them off to bed. Soothes their furrowed brows until they drift off to sleep.

The moon, wiser than us all. She knows what we would all do well to learn. 

One night can tip a hand.

One night can send a path ricocheting off in a different direction, previously unknown. 

One night can be the gift that changes everything.

But the work that follows, that work belongs to those below. 

And it takes time. 

I would like to tell you that Eddie walked down the stairs in the morning to find a note on the kitchen counter. Dani gone, Jamie by her side. A new life, blooming around them.

I would like to tell you that there were no more bloodied lips, no more tears, no more hearts shattering in their cages.

But you know better, dear reader, and so do I.

Jamie lets her hand fall from Dani’s cheek. A soft and broken smile shared across two faces.

She catches Dani’s hands, raising them to her lips to press a kiss to one palm, then the other.

Dani’s eyes drift shut to block out the impending dawn, to known nothing, for a moment, except the press of lips to palm. 

They walk to the front door, hand in hand.

The turn of the knob.

The tick of the clock.

Jamie leaves.

And the night is done.

As the door clicks shut, the alarm clock begins to blare upstairs. 

The harsh proclamation of the coming day, wholly unnecessary. 

Dani is well aware.

Only as she washes the mugs in the sink and tucks away the kettle,

only as she stows the antiseptic and throws away the rag,

only as she erases the last scraps of evidence

that the night had existed,

that _Jamie_ had existed,

only then does Dani realize she is shaking. 

Violence coursing through her limbs, her whole body rebelling against the new day rising.

She had looked into the dark corner, the one she had always let her eyes skim by, unprepared for what she would see there. 

And now, the sun is rising, and she cannot unsee. 

She _will not_ unsee.

One night, to change everything.

It would be several months before their paths would cross again.


	3. something new

Jamie walks home, though every bit of her begs to turn back.

She climbs the endless flights of stairs to the single room she doesn’t bother to call her own. Lays down and stares at the ceiling, at its cracks and cobwebs. 

The risk of waking to find the night has been a dream gnaws at her, and she does not sleep. 

The clock ticks by, well into morning.

Too restless, she rises and dons a sweater, then a second. Even so, she cannot shake the chill that has settled into the heart of her.

There is a pay phone on the corner.

A worn piece of paper she has carried with her for years now, tucked into her wallet, now cradled in her palm.

She dials.

“Hello?” A voice she has not heard in many years, a voice she had thought she had forgotten.

Jamie sags back against the brick wall, throat too tight, too tight to answer.

Again, “Hello?” 

Jamie coughs to force her lungs to act. Scrubs one hand across her face and speaks. “Owen. Hi.”

“Jamie!” Two words, and already he knows her.

Warmth seeps into her, easing heavy dread. The phone, an unexpected conduit.

“Jamie," he says again. "I’m so glad you’ve called.”

Jamie met Owen years ago, just after arriving in the city. 

Skin and bones at that point, bearing the scars of home, scraping by each day on odd jobs and petty theft in a world that was not interested in allowing her any better.

Owen had just arrived as well, barely making ends meet scrubbing dishes in an unforgiving restaurant kitchen from dawn to dark. 

Neighbors in a building that was too crowded, too loud, too far below standards to bear any safety, they struck up an easy friendship. Shared meals of too little and late nights lying on the bare floor, talking of nothing.

But he was rising. 

And she was falling.

They had met at an intersection of paths, traveling in opposite directions.

The day came, so soon, too soon, when he had something to offer, something to share, enough in him to spare a bit for her. 

A lead on a steady job that could lead her somewhere. A safer spot to live. Someone safe to talk to about the things that are not nothing. 

Offers he made in kindness, with an open, giving heart.

But every fiber of Jamie, every ounce of her being, told her to run. 

Well taught in the ways of fight and flight and knowing no different. Outstretched hands were for fists, for bloodied lips and bruises. Offers carried consequences and prices too steep to pay.

She didn't know it at the time, the why of the running. She didn’t know why her gut twisted, why it felt like sadness instead of fear.

She couldn’t yet see what the world had done to her, couldn't yet see that the quiet stories it whispered in her ear were lies, meant to hold her in her place.

So she ran, and hated herself for it. Ran, and hated the world even more.

But Owen was a good man, a good friend, and he saw her clearly, saw the running in her eyes.

“If you ever change your mind,” he said, his suitcase packed and the keys turned in, “call.”

He pressed a scrap of paper into her palm. “Anytime, Jamie. Years from now, or tomorrow. Just call.”

Years, spent falling.

Years, spent scrambling up and falling again, farther than the last time.

And then, one night.

Front steps, bloodied knuckles and glass in her cheek.

Dani.

The scrap of paper, still in her pocket, waiting. 

Jamie takes a bus across the city that very afternoon and Owen greets her with open arms.

They eat lunch in the sunshine, side by side. Lunch, cooked by Owen’s hands, which have grown skilled.

And then there are offers, just as kind, just as openly given as they had been years ago.

A customer of his, renovating an old manor. Groundskeeping work, brutal on the body, but steady. Enough. 

A phone number of a woman, Tamara, who counsels at the community center down the road. Relentless, he’s heard, but a start.

A hug. Her first in far too long, her first that has not come with expectation or condition. The shell of her, fracturing under the soft weight of his arms wrapped around her.

A promise of next week, of _call, anytime_.

There are offers, and this time, she does not run.

Months pass.

Her body, bruised and worn in a new way, no longer flinches for the fight, for the flight.

Greens grow at her coaxing, unexpected beauty at her fingertips.

Bunches of flowers, tied in hand, as offering, as thanks.

Sleep, at night.

Dreams, of Dani.

The turning of a year. 

An invitation, she accepts. 

Dani sits at the kitchen table, tea in hand, grown cold.

“What are you doing? You don’t drink tea,” Eddie says, ambling down the stairs, chuckling as though this is funny, as though he knows her.

“Eddie,” she says, before she can lose the nerve, before her heart can fail her.

Jamie’s lips, still warm on her palms.

“Eddie, we need to talk.”

The conversation, to stretch the definition of the word to its limit, does not go well. 

Tears, Dani’s. 

Laughter, quickly slipping to bewilderment, growing hot to anger, Eddie’s. 

There is a tremor in her voice as she speaks, but she does not rise to meet him as he rages. 

Once the words start, they do not stop. They flow through her, up the spine and into each fingertip, steadying and sure. 

Words that have been waiting.

Surer than she has ever been. 

More terrified, too.

She moves out the next day, mothers standing by in confusion as their soothing does not stick, as they find they cannot round the edges of her any longer.

Small apartment, across town. Sparse, but it’s hers and hers alone. 

New school district, new classroom, new faces that do not know her, do not know what she has done to arrive there.

Alone, but in a new way. Better, somehow, to be alone this way, instead of alone in a sea of bodies who hug and smile and love a version of her they’ve written for themselves.

A new friend. Hers, for the first time, not his. Hannah, in the classroom next door. Hannah, with her kind eyes which see Dani clearly, which matter. 

The turning of a year. 

An invitation, she accepts. 

Dani would have preferred to stay home. Would have preferred to drink a glass of wine and crawl into bed at ten. Sleep like a zombie and let the new year come without witness.

But the defiant bit of her, the bit that is still angry with the passage of time, the bit that has lost too much already. The bit that has missed everything, that is _still_ missing everything.

That bit chose to come.

So here she is, at Hannah’s door on New Year’s Eve, as the snow drifts down around her and the chill cuts through the tights she wore for some reason she disagrees with now. 

She still feels it, at moments like this – the absence of Eddie’s arm around her. That weight, never wanted, never asked for, never refused. The itchy armor she let him lay across her, to fend off the thumping heart of herself, a shield against eyes that might have seen her for what she is.

There’s a different weight now, in its place. 

The weight of walking in alone – the possibility of embarrassment, of the crushing loneliness of a crowded room. The possibility of something else, which is, somehow, even heavier. Something new. Something…

So, the compromise with herself. Come late. Leave early. Win a skirmish, not a war.

She turns the knob.

The room is packed, bodies drifting along through silver, bobbing softly to the trio of college kids playing strings in the corner.

 _Someday_ , she tells herself. Someday she will feel at ease in a room like this. Someday, she will have built her own bubble, filled it with familiar faces and the comfortable lean of bodies.

But for now, Hannah is nowhere to be seen, and Dani is unmoored at the front door. 

Hands, too empty, nothing to guide her body into a less awkward stance, she gravitates to the long table of snacks and small bites. A plate, at least, is something to cling to, an excuse that will suffice briefly. 

She picks her way along, seeing echoes of the comfort foods and experimental cuisine that Hannah pulls from her lunchbox at noon every day with warm smiles and kitchen stories and fond chuckles.

Halfway down the table are three vases in a neat row, dividing savory from sweet. Each is filled with delicate flowers in whites and soft purples, bursting up. 

Dani pauses, smoothing a soft petal between the pads of her fingers.

Then a voice, familiar, called up from dreams at night.

“Grew those myself. They’re some of my favorites.”

Dani turns, breath sucking into her lungs, smile already blooming.

Jamie, there, not a foot from her. She tumbles backwards through the months, tumbles back to her doorstep in the middle of the night, to a kiss on her palm, to steady hands stilling her own. 

To eyes that saw, to eyes that are watching her now, waiting.

“Jamie!” 

Dani stops herself, only barely, from launching herself into Jamie’s unsuspecting arms.

“Dani.” Jamie breathes the word as her face splits into a broad grin that suits her deeply. 

Dani almost asks her to say it again. Just once more, just once more so she can tuck it into her for later.

“How do you – why are you – here?” Dani’s head is spinning, her heart, thundering in her.

“Owen’s an old friend. We reconnected a few months back. I’m not much for nights out, but he promised homemade ice cream after midnight, so... You?”

“Hannah’s kind of taken me under her wing at school. She’s so nice. She walked into my classroom on Friday and invited me, then left before I could think of a good excuse to say no. So, here I am.” 

Dani shrugs, helplessly ineloquent under the shock of Jamie’s gaze. Unexpected, _so_ unexpected.

Jamie chuckles lightly, nodding. “Sounds about right. They’re a pair, those two.”

She glances over her shoulder and Dani follows.

Hannah and Owen, in the kitchen doorway. Owen leaning in behind Hannah to whisper in her ear. Her soft smile, the tilt of her chin, a hand coming up to cup his cheek as he slips his arms around her. 

“It’s nice,” Jamie says quietly, almost to herself.

They don’t fill in the months between one midnight and the next, nor the years that came before. 

That would come later, in the early hours of the new morning, fingertips tracing slow patterns on skin, their bodies having grown well acquainted in the intervening hours.

For now, they sit on the couch and talk lightly as old friends, letting the gravity between them say the rest. The tug of it, beneath the surface, undeniable, dizzying.

Little stories and laughter and comfortable silences that feel too easy to be real.

Dani’s hand on Jamie’s forearm.

Jamie’s thumb, brushing across Dani’s knee.

The gentle lean of bodies, so unfamiliar and yet…

It’s nearly midnight now and the moon is watching, swollen to her fullest and deeply pleased.

The birth of a new year. The end of one chapter and the start of the next. 

The start of a new story to be told, again and again.

Flutes of champagne at the clock’s insistence.

The room stands, glasses raised to the clock and its tick, songs and cheers at the ready.

They stand side by side, shoulders brushing, knuckle to knuckle.

Dani feels Jamie’s eyes on her. She turns and finds the question, waiting on Jamie’s lips.

“Was there enough left?”

“What?” Dani murmurs, her hand fluttering at her side.

Jamie shifts towards her, eyes intent. Her brow carries weight that had not been there a moment before, on the couch in laughter.

“Was there enough of you left, Dani? After?”

_Ah, yes._

Dani reaches up and smooths a finger across the faint pink scar on Jamie’s cheek. Jamie leans into the touch, turning cheek to palm.

“Yes,” Dani says. “There was plenty, as it turns out.”

She tucks a curl behind Jamie’s ear, thumb along jaw. “And you, Jamie? Was there enough?”

Jamie nods, her face a mess of hope and the sorrow that bore it.

“Good,” Dani whispers, as she leans in, as Jamie’s breath catches between them. 

Fingers, caught up in curls. A shaking palm to cradle.

Midnight still has seconds yet, but the clock cannot hold them.

A kiss, at last.

Work takes time, and the kiss had waited so patiently.

A tender promise of the next and the next and the next. 

Something new, rising.

The clock ticks to midnight. 

One night, to change everything. 

Two lives, separate and fading until the collision. 

The sparks of it, brilliant against the darkness.

The moon smiles and winks. She is a wily minx at heart, despite the softness of her.

Ice cream, in a dozen flavors only Owen could dream up.

A soft sway to strings, hands clasped between chests, foreheads tucked into the nook between shoulder and neck, breath slow across skin.

A walk home, fingers entwined. 

A set of front steps, and one night to change everything.


End file.
